much of it details technical reasons why digital is much much better than analog for intelligent systems

For current LLMs there would be a massive gain in energy efficiency if analogue computing was used. Much of the current energy costs come from stimulating what effectively analogue processing on digital hardware. There’s a lot lost in the conversation, or “emulation” of analogue.

I’ve been using “cheap” 43" 4k TVs as my main monitor for over a decade now. I used to go purely with Hisense, they have great colour and PC text clarity, and I could get them most places for $250 CAD. But this year’s model they switched from RGB subpixel layout to BGR, which is tricky to get working cleanly on a computer, even when forcing a BGR layout in the OS. One trick is to just flip the TV upside down (yes it actually works) but it just made the whole physical setup awkward. I went with a Sony recently for significantly more, but the picture quality is fantastic.

Then don’t buy those devices. If you have any excuse as to why you “can’t do that”, then there’s zero point in complaining. I’m not saying your complaints are invalid, and companies should be held accountable and criticised. But as long as people buy privacy violating products, companies will continue to violate privacy.

You mean from just now? Otherwise I don’t get the reference

Ok, now I’m actually curious how you managed to do that. Please do tell!

I can tell you from personal experience that you’re wrong

If enough people bring it up to their work, then the policy can be re-evaluated.

Boss told me I couldn’t use EndeavourOS because “it doesn’t work with M$ InTune”.

That’s technically not true, it will work but with the caveat that Intune will show the device as non-compliant for the OS itself. If the OS version isn’t included in any of the applied policies then it shouldn’t matter.

Shh, just let them complain about their boyfriend.

I tried to demo an agentic AI in Jetbrains to a coworker, just as a “hey look at this neat thing that can make changes on its own”. As the example I told it to convert a constructor in c# to a primary constructor.

So it “thought” and made the change, “thought” again and reverted the change, “thought” once again and made the change again, then it “thought” for a 4th time and reverted the changes again. I stopped it there and just shook my head.

It’s the same reason that facial recognition has more false positives for people with more melanin in their skin.

This is not the real reason. It’s because camera tech from more than 10 years ago was worse than today and had trouble with anything less than ideal lighting conditions. Darker textures reflect less light, so the darker someone’s skin the less details a camera can see.

However we’re still talking about a 0.001 FMR for white men to a 0.002 FMR for black men. That’s “2x more false matches” but it’s a 0.001 difference.

With modern cameras and recent facial recognition tech, the issue in differences of skin colour is virtually non-existent. Yes, I know of the news stories about false arrests in recent years, but no tech is perfect and you’re talking about a few instances out of billions.

No, I’m not defending the use of the tech, just pointing out facts.

I read your comment. You basically repeated back what I said.

As for “not actually anything extra reliability”, that’s not true. This is literally the definition of all your eggs in one basket. If all these services were instead spread out amongst smaller providers, there wouldn’t have even been any news about it because it would have affected just a few services. But instead half the internet went down.

Even one of the applications I manage was down because of a single RTE npm dependency used on the forms. This is when we discovered that the npm module wasn’t bundling the whole thing but in fact dynamically pulling the js from a CDN hosted on AWS, because our prod instances kept erroring out for everyone (No, I did not write this application and I’m already replacing the dependency).

The argument isn’t about spending thousands for a lateral shift in reliability, the argument is to decouple everything from a single failure point.

NM, I had it in my head that absolute zero is -253.15, but it’s -273.15

Did you read my entire comment? I know it’s more than one sentence, but your entire comment would be irrelevant if you read the whole thing.

That would break physics (assuming you’re using Celsius)

Can you name a more reliable alternative?

Stop using hyperscalers. Then when an outage does occur, it doesn’t take down half the internet, and instead only affects a much smaller subset of services.

How many people in your city know what self-hosting even is, though?

WAAAAAY more than you’re giving credit for

They’re tech entertainers, and Linus is the clown jester.

they’re cheap fucks.

This is also the issue with most tech job postings. I got this one job offer, entirely unsolicited from my end, to move across the country to Manitoba to a small town. They were going to offer up to $5000 moving costs. And the job was for a full stack developer. The salary? $42k Canadian.

I emailed them back telling them in blunt terms that their offer is insulting and far too low for any developer role.

I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad idea.

No, this is a bad idea. It’s a terrible idea.

What you said is like saying “well, I need surgery, having the monkey from the forest come at me with a knife is better than nothing.”

Microsoft has proven themselves over and over to be the last company you should trust with your data. Even recently they’ve been responsible for losing a life’s worth of data because of OneDrive

They’re already uploading people’s data off of their computers to OneDrive without consent, then deleting the local copies.

Plus their tech work culture is lacking. When they screwed something up with Office 365 and Outlook wasn’t available for over 18 hours (for basically the whole world), their response was a tweet that it’s fixed.

Whereas CloudFlare messed up something for only an hour, they released a comprehensive breakdown on their blog of what happened, what the root cause was, and what they’re going to do to prevent it from happening again.

Which company seems reliable to you?